Interesting people do interesting things, and FIU’s newly named distinguished university professors prove the point. Each has made a mark on his or her respective field with research to improve our world while educating the next generation. Critical to their success: early influences that over the years have fueled their motivation and sustained their commitment. Meet them here.
Berrin Tansel
Professor
Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
College of Engineering & Computer Science
In a tiny town in Turkey, a young Berrin Tansel spent warm days swimming with her five siblings in clear coastal waters. But when the children began coming home with black, sticky tar on their feet, Tansel knew her agricultural and fishing village was in for a change: The petroleum industry had arrived.
What she couldn’t know at the time was how that event would impact her own life and career. The daughter of parents without even high school diplomas took interest in the petrochemical companies’ hiring of engineers, her first awareness of the profession.
That led to her pursuing a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from a university in Ankara, which she followed with a master’s and a doctorate in civil and environmental engineering in the United States, courtesy of a Fulbright Scholarship. Among her first jobs were senior project engineer for a consulting firm and project manager with the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority.
Today, Tansel is a professor of environmental engineering and the undergraduate program director of the department of civil and environmental engineering. Her expertise lies in coastal water management and pollution, coastal hazards and water conservation with primary interests in sustainable sludge treatment and landfill processes, among others.
She has helped NASA build water recycling and conservation systems for use in space vehicles – based on a filtration system she developed with the Army for use during the Gulf War – and worked on the Boston Harbor project that transformed the then-dirtiest dirtiest harbor in America. She was also part of the team that led research on the effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion off the Louisiana coast.
True to her earliest love, when not on campus, Tansel is often found rowing her own boat on South Florida waters.
Mahadev Bhat
Professor, Department of Earth and Environment
College of Arts, Sciences & Education
Mahadev Bhat grew up raising cattle, betel nuts, bananas and black pepper on his parents’ farm in South India. He also foraged in forests and mountains for berries. Those experiences encouraged him to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agriculture and work as a finance officer specializing in loans to small farmers.
His interests eventually led him to the United States to pursue a doctorate in agricultural and natural resources economics and, in the 1990s, a faculty position at FIU, where his arrival signaled the start of a rewarding career in academia and would result in the university’s earning recognition as a standout institution in Bhat’s field of expertise.
With funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bhat co-founded the Agroecology Program in 2005 and has since prepared hundreds of students for technical and leadership roles within federal agencies, industry and non-governmental organizations. On campus, he co-established an organic garden that teaches sustainable agricultural practices to FIU and K-12 students.
Further afield, Bhat has ventured south of FIU to an area of undeveloped agricultural land – ideal for growing bell peppers, green beans and squash in addition to tropical fruits – to encourage military veterans and underserved farmers to nurture small agri-businesses at a time when the average age of U.S. farmers is rapidly rising. The USDA-funded program has garnered acclaim for providing hundreds with workshops and other support.
Bhat relied on his background in natural resource economics to co-lead several groundbreaking studies that put a dollar value – in the billions –on the carbon storage and other ecosystem services provided by the Florida Everglades. That work has contributed to the national discussion on climate control.
A gentleman farmer – Bhat grows eight different types of tropical fruits and plants in a standard-sized backyard – he remains dedicated to both safeguarding the environment and securing the world’s food supply at a time of great challenges.
Angela Laird
Professor, Department of Physics
College of Arts, Sciences & Education
Angela Laird uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to understand the organization of large-scale networks in the human brain. But when the seasoned cognitive neuroscientist arrived at FIU in 2012 fresh from conducting intensive biomedical research – today she is the director of FIU’s multidisciplinary Center for Imaging Science – she found herself facing a task she had not performed in more than a decade: relying on her background in physics to teach an introductory course on the subject. She not only relished the challenge of getting undergraduates up to speed, but she made them the focus of a serious scientific investigation.
Seeing her students fight with the material – “They would struggle and struggle and get mad at me” – Laird wanted to determine what went on in their heads as they eventually mastered it. To document the changes that occur during the progression from lack of understanding to the acquisition of a critical thinking skill, she devised a study.
She began by imaging volunteers’ brains early in the semester and again at the end, by which time, she says, “the light bulb would come on and they would get it, and they were overjoyed.” Both times, students completed a computer-based multiple-choice task while Laird and her team studied in real time which areas of the brain were activated.
The scientists found their takeaway when comparing the before and after scans: The so-called “default node network,” which comprises portions of several brain regions and is associated with non-goal behavior and a resting state, was more active in the post-class students.
The study results have ramifications not only for the teaching of STEM majors – researchers are interested in how the brain ultimately integrates disparate items of information into a specific context - but may also help clinicians identify the sources of disruption that leads to conditions like depression, schizophrenia and autism.
Wasim Maziak
Professor, Department of Epidemiology
Robert Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work
Wasim Maziak trained and worked in his native Syria as a respiratory physician passionate about researching tobacco use. “When you’re in a developing country, you cannot escape smoking—it’s just everywhere,” he says. Even for nonsmokers, “Life can be miserable because you are often exposed to cigarette smoke in the workplace, public places and while using public transportation. Without policy and regulations in place, the health burden from smoking to smokers and nonsmokers is second to no other risk factor.”
While completing a fellowship in Germany, Maziak learned of an opportunity to conduct collaborative work back home as part of an initiative by the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health. He partnered with scholars in the United States on a proposal that led to his establishing and directing the Syrian Center for Tobacco Studies. The connections that made that possible, however, would also be the cause of Maziak’s fleeing in 2006. Tense U.S.-Syria relations during the Iraq War turned his ties with American researchers into a liability. Out of concern for his safety, those same collaborators helped him relocate to the United States.
A surprise at the time, Maziak’s earlier focus on the addictive and harmful properties of hookah smoking soon found new relevance. “All of a sudden, the hookah epidemic that I was studying became a global phenomenon,” he recalls. “I was one of the very few specialists who knew anything about this topic.” His career took off.
He has since broadened his work to include a related area of study: e-cigarettes. With funding from the NIH, which has continuously supported him since 2001, Maziak built a state-of-the art lab at FIU that doubles as a national hub for regulatory and policy research related to e-cigarette use. His work has included developing and testing warning labels and testing addiction reduction strategies.
Giri Narasimhan
Ryder Endowed Professor, Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences
College of Engineering & Computing
For years, Giri Narasimhan applied his training in computer science to teach students and conduct his own well-regarded research. Then came the chance to use wisdom accumulated in AI and machine learning to advance scientific studies across disciplines, and things got really interesting.
At university in India in the 1980s, Narasimhan admired one-time physicists who made breakthroughs in biology, such as Louis Pasteur and Francis Crick. They inspired him two decades later when he saw his molecular microbiologist wife painstakingly charting by hand the possible positions in which proteins bind in specific DNA sequences. Narasimhan wrote a computer program that spat out lines of data to reveal scientifically significant patterns.
His years as a professor of computer science and math at various academic institutions would soon give way to visiting positions at a pharmaceutical company and in the microbiology and molecular genetics department of Harvard Medical School.
At FIU since 2001, Narasimhan last year co-published an article about a study of molecular interactions, and his Bioinformatics Research Group is currently investigating microbiomes in the human intestine and mouth. He also has worked with civil engineers to control floods during hurricane season and public policy professors to detect possible biases in local government services.
Able to speak on disparate projects with expertise, and integrally involved in their analyses, Narasimhan nonetheless reduces them to one unifying factor: “In the end, it’s all data, all numbers. That kind of thing excites me as a nerd.”
Yet the numbers nerd reveals passion when he talks of helping solve some very human problems. He founded the Academy for Computer Science Education, which has offered workshops to 500 K-12 STEM teachers charged with teaching coding without prior training in computer science. And he cherishes working with Breakthrough Tech, which seeks to reduce gender biases in technology by drawing females into the computing field.